This is WHY Most Content Creators Fail: They LIED To You

Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash

I spent five years on X, formerly Twitter. Out of 5, I spent 2 actively trying to build a following.

Five years of posting, experimenting, alternating between niches, trying to find what worked. I wrote hooks. I studied formats. I did the whole thing — “5 ways to…” threads, motivational quotes, repurposed content from people with bigger audiences than mine.

After those five years, I had about 300 followers.

Then one week, I did something different.

I wrote a thread about Kwadwo Sheldon — one of Ghana’s biggest content creators. Not a casual mention. A full breakdown. Deeply researched. His journey from scratch, the moments most people had missed, his content decisions, his business moves, his arc. I embedded videos, pulled receipts, and laid out his whole story in a way that made you feel like you’d just attended a masterclass on building a media brand in Africa

That thread flew.

In the next 24 hours, I got 300 more followers. The same number I’d spent five years accumulating. From one post.

And that broke something open in my head — because it wasn’t a hook that did it. It wasn’t a trending format or a perfectly timed post or a viral carousel. It was depth. It was doing the work to give people something they genuinely couldn’t find anywhere else. and I went on to try this strategy multiple times; I got to about 1k followers with just 4 posts.

That was the day I stopped chasing the number and started thinking about what the number actually means.

The Vanity Metric Trap

Follower count is the most seductive lie in the creator economy.

It feels objective. It’s right there on your profile for everyone to see. It goes up or it doesn’t. And because it’s visible and countable, we treat it like the scoreboard — like the person with the most followers is winning.

But I want to ask you something.

Have you ever clicked on someone’s profile, seen 1.2 million followers, and then scrolled through their last 20 posts to find they’re averaging 300 likes?

Or opened a comment section to find it empty — no conversation, noarguments, and, no real engagement of any kind?

I have. Repeatedly.

And I’ve seen the opposite too. Someone with 8,000 followers who gets 400 comments every time they post. People arguing in their replies. People sharing their content in WhatsApp groups. People tagging friends.

That creator has influence—real, measurable influence that converts to attention, trust, and eventually money. The person with 1.2 million has a vanity number.

The reason this happens is simple: follower count doesn’t measure loyalty. It measures how many people clicked a button at some point in time.

Some of those people followed you because of one post they stumbled on. Some because someone they know shared your content. Some because you followed them first and they followed back. Most of them have already forgotten you exist. Their feed moved on. Their algorithm replaced you with someone else. And now you’re just a number sitting on their following list.

Likes are even worse. Likes are what people give when they don’t care enough to comment but feel vaguely positive about something. You can rack up thousands of likes and have zero real influence over anyone.

Saves are better. Shares are better. Comments are the best — especially the kind where someone is genuinely responding to what you said, agreeing or pushing back or adding their own experience to the conversation.

But none of these are the real metric either.

The real metric is, what do people know you for?

Find that for yourself.

What I Learned From Watching 100+ Creators Up Close

Over the past few years — through my time at Radio Univers, through working with Derrick Abaitey at Konnected House, through managing content for founders and building my own audiences from scratch — I’ve watched a lot of creators operate. Some up close. Some from a distance.

I’ve engaged with over 100 public-facing people: YouTubers, podcasters, LinkedIn creators, Twitter builders, Instagram educators, startup founders who’ve built personal brands. Some Ghanaian. Some Nigerian. Some diaspora. Some with huge audiences. Some with tiny ones that punch way above their weight.

And I’ve noticed patterns.

The creators with loyal audiences all share one thing: they are known for something specific.

Not “content creation". Not "entrepreneurship". Not “personal development". Those are categories, not identities.

I mean something like a guy explaining how African founders are building media businesses. Or: The woman showing young Ghanaians how they can use AI tools to get ahead in their careers.

The creators who chase broad appeal — who post about everything, who jump on every trending topic, who try to be the person for everyone — tend to have inflated follower numbers and hollow engagement. They blow up on a viral post, gain a wave of new followers, and then watch their numbers stagnate because those followers had no idea what they were signing up for.

The ones who build real influence pick a lane and go deep. They create a body of work that says something. And when someone new comes across their profile, they get it immediately — this is what this person is about. And if that thing resonates, they don’t just click follow. They go back and read everything. They turn on notifications. They become the kind of follower who actually sees and engages with your content every time you post.

That’s the difference between an audience and a number.

The Creator Who Doesn’t Even Edit His Videos

There’s a guy I’ve been watching for a while. Dark skin and called VeryDarkMan, Nigerian, no frills, no production value to speak of. He shoots videos on his phone. The lighting is average. He doesn’t edit. Sometimes the audio isn’t perfect.

And people love him. What about Gehgeh? No editing

Not in a polite way. In an obsessive way. They share his videos. They quote him. They talk about him in other people’s comment sections. He has a fraction of the followers of creators with fully equipped studios and production teams, but when he posts, the ratio is insane.

I become surprised when I see these “unpolished” creators climb up our most viewed videos categories while some of the very polished ones don’t command as much authority.

At Konnected House, we talk about this a lot. We called it “organic” — videos that are unpolished, unfiltered, and raw. And we noticed something: those videos consistently outperform the clean, edited, well-produced ones. So we do well to usually go organic a lot of times when we NEED to.

At first that sounds counterintuitive. You’d think quality would win. And in a world where people are consciously evaluating production, quality matters. But most people aren’t watching content consciously. They’re scrolling. And when they hit something that feels real — sometimes with no jump cuts, no transitions, no script — something in them pauses.

*This person is just talking. And that’s rare enough that it stops the scroll. Peep how much views lives get and how many hours people dedicate to watch their favorite creator’s lives.

The creator who doesn’t edit his videos isn’t succeeding despite his lack of polish. He’s succeeding partly because of it. Because polish, done badly, creates distance. It signals that someone is presenting a curated version of themselves. And audiences — especially younger audiences who grew up watching influencers fake it — can smell that from miles away.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t invest in quality. It means authenticity is a prerequisite. You can have both. But if you have to choose, real always beats refined.

Why the Algorithm Rewards Value, Not Metrics

Here’s something people misunderstand about social media algorithms.

They’re not trying to make you go viral. They’re trying to keep users on the platform. Every algorithm — Instagram’s, LinkedIn’s, X’s, TikTok’s — is optimised for one thing: engagement. Not reach. Engagement.

And the kind of content that drives engagement is content that makes people feel something strong enough to act on it. That action might be a comment, a share, a save, a reply, or a follow. It might even be spending three extra minutes on your profile because they wanted to read more of your stuff.

What doesn’t drive that? Content that’s interchangeable. Hooks that everyone is using. Listicles that you’ve seen a hundred times. Advice so generic that it could have been written by anyone.

Volume matters — consistency is real, and posting regularly does help. But the volume of interchangeable content is the same as silence. You’re posting into a void and wondering why nothing’s growing.

The people I’ve watched grow the fastest aren’t the ones who post the most. They’re the ones who create a post that makes someone stop, read the whole thing, and then go, ”I need to follow this person” or “I need to save this video."

You can post three times a day and never create that experience. Or you can post twice a week with content so specific and well-observed that every post does it.

People post just three times a week, and you see their followers waiting in their stories.

“can tomorrow come alreadyyy?" “I’m hyped for tomorrow." "Can you just post it today?"

The goal isn’t to appear in the feed. The goal is to matter when you do.

What Happened After the X Threads

Those 300 followers I gained in 24 hours — some of them are still following me today. Some of them became people I’ve worked with. Some of them opened doors I didn’t even know existed.

Because the thread wasn’t just content. It was a signal about who I am and what I’m capable of. It said, 'This person does the work.' This person goes deep. This person is trying to understand Ghana’s creator economy and can translate it for an audience.

That’s what brought in the right people.

Not everyone. Not a mass audience that kind of vaguely knows my name. The right people — founders, creators, operators, and people building things. They recognised something in that thread and thought, I want to be in orbit with whoever made this.

After I understood that, my whole approach to content changed.

I stopped trying to appeal to everyone and started trying to serve a specific person — the young African who is ambitious, building something, tired of generic advice, and wants to see what it actually looks like to figure this out in real time. I started posting about my real experiences: the failures, the pivots, the wins, the confusion. The stuff I was actually living through.

And the engagement changed for my LinkedIn

Not just the numbers. The quality. People started messaging me to tell me they’d shared my posts with friends. Founders started reaching out. Opportunities started appearing that were directly related to what I was writing about.

PS: I’m on the way to changing it all up because I’m re-niching lmao, but I hope to see you there

That’s the difference between a following and an audience. A following is passive. An audience is active. An audience shows up, participates, shares, responds, and eventually converts – to clients, to collaborators, to community members.

Can you fill up an event space for 30 people? Paid or unpaid?

The Reputation Economy

Here’s the mental model I want you to carry away from this.

Social media is a reputation economy. Followers are just the surface-level currency. The real currency is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.

Do people know what you do? Can they explain it clearly to someone else? When your content comes up in a conversation, do people say “oh I love their stuff” or “I follow them but I don’t really know what they post about”?

The second answer is what a vanity following looks like in real life. People technically follow you but they couldn’t tell you why.

The first answer is what real influence looks like. And it doesn’t require a massive number to get there. I’ve seen people with 3,000 followers land brand deals, consulting clients, and speaking gigs that people with 300,000 followers couldn’t. Because those 3,000 people are the right 3,000 people — and they’re paying attention.

Building that kind of audience is harder than chasing virality. It requires you to actually have a point of view. To take positions. To go deep on things instead of staying safely broad. To post the honest thing instead of the safe thing. To create content that some people will love and other people will scroll past — because that’s what specificity does. It repels as much as it attracts.

But the people it attracts? They stay.

What You Should Actually Be Tracking

So Nana Asiamah you just said my whole life was a lie.

If follower count and likes are the wrong metrics, what should I be looking at?

I’ll tell you what we look at for our clients and partners now

Comments per post — especially the quality of comments. Are people just saying "Great post” or are they actually engaging with the idea? Real comments mean you said something that landed.

Shares and reposts — when someone shares your content without being asked, they’re putting their reputation behind yours. That’s the highest endorsement an audience member can give.

DMs from strangers — when someone who doesn’t know you messages you because of something you posted, you’ve created a moment of real connection. Count those because I love these so much.

Profile visits — if people are reading your post and then going to your profile, your content is working. They want to know more about who you are.

Retention — are the same people engaging with you week after week, or is every post a fresh audience that disappears? Retention is loyalty. Loyalty is what you’re building toward.

And most importantly: inbound opportunities.

Are things coming to you because of your content? Clients, collaborations, invitations, introductions? When that starts happening, you know your audience is real.

None of these metrics are as clean or satisfying as a follower count. They’re harder to track. But they’re honest. They tell you whether you’re building something real or just accumulating noise.

The Questions Underneath All of This

I think the obsession with follower count comes from a deeper anxiety that most creators are too honest to admit: what if nobody actually cares?

And also people don’t know why they want to create content so they follow everyone and chase followers. I’ll explain in a bit

The Anxiety

If you have 50,000 followers, you can tell yourself people care. The number is proof. But if you have 800 followers and every single one of them is engaged, you might feel like you’re not there yet – even though you’re building something more durable than most people with 10x your count.

The number feels like validation. And when you’re starting out, and you’re posting into what feels like a void, and you’re watching other people’s numbers climb while yours stays flat, it’s hard not to treat the count as the measure of whether you’re doing something that matters.

But it’s a trap. The count is lagging. It’s always behind reality. The real thing that’s happening — the reputation being built, the specific community forming, the ideas spreading from person to person — all of that is invisible in the metrics for a long time. And if you mistake the silence for failure, you’ll pivot before the thing you’re building has time to compound.

The Clarity Problem

Before you post anything, ask yourself one question: what is this content supposed to do for me? and for them

I create content to get clients for MediaWura. That means every post I write or record is quietly aimed at business owners, DTC sellers, ecommerce operators — people who are trying to sell and market products and need help doing it.

If I have 500 followers and three of them become paying clients, I’ve won. The other 497 don’t matter.

A real estate agent with 2,000 followers who closes one apartment sale every three months is not losing. They’re eating. The follower count is irrelevant if the right 2,000 people are watching.

This is what most creators miss. They’re optimising for reach when they should be optimising for relevance. You don’t need everyone to follow you. You need the right people to follow you — and to trust you enough to eventually buy from you, hire you, or send you someone who will.

Know what your content is for. Build toward that. The peace comes when the number stops mattering because the results already do.

The question isn’t how many people follow me?

The question is what do they follow me for?

Answer that. Build toward that. Create content that only you could create, about things only you have lived, for people who are specifically looking for what you specifically have to offer.

The followers will come. And when they do, they’ll mean something.

PPS: Follower count isn’t a hoax because large audiences create distribution advantages. A million followers gives you opportunities that a thousand followers won’t (if you know how). The mistake is treating follower count as the goal rather than the by-product. A large audience with trust is powerful. A large audience without trust is decoration. Bye